The Real and the Abstract: Science and Eroticism in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô

In 1922, when poet and critic Tsuji Jun (1884-1944) declared Albert Einstein to be a “Dadaist” who “denies the absolute,” he was revealing not only the avant-garde status that Einstein had acquired in late Taisho Japan, but also a common misunderstanding about Relativity theory itself. [1] For many artists and poets, in fact, it was this misunderstanding which formed the basis of Einstein’s “revolutionary” image.

The year that Tsuji wrote these lines, Einstein had reached a peak of popularity in Japan. His lecture tour there in the late autumn and winter of 1922 had made him an instant super-star whose photographed image – standing on the train platform in Nagoya or at a garden in Kyoto, among Japanese scientists at Tokyo station or on the cover of the journal Kaizô – always seemed to convey at once the ideal of the gentle science-philosopher, the purveyor of radical wisdom, and the modern genius. Although his Japanese tour included only seven speeches (about five hours of total talking, after calculating for breaks), Einstein’s presentations provoked a far-reaching popular response.[2] The attendant “Relativity boom” saw at least twenty-three books on the subject of Einstein’s theory published between 1921 and 1922 alone, including a translation of Einstein’s own explanation for the general reader, and several easy-to-read versions by physicist and science-journalist, Ishihara Jun.[3]

Not surprisingly, this explosion of explanatory texts never exactly clarified for most non-specialists the basics of a theory that defied so fundamentally our intuitive understanding of the way things are. Although the cryptic nature of Relativity may indeed have been part of its appeal, few had any doubts about the connotations of the term “relativity” itself. As Tsuji Jun’s words suggest, in fact, many writers and critics mistook Relativity theory for nothing other than the scientific proclamation of the victory of relativism over the dictatorial rule of “the absolute.”

It is true, of course that by proposing an understanding of time that is not separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called “space-time,” Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity subverted the transcendent perspective implied by the Newtonian universe. For Newton, time was “absolute,” independent of motion or mass, equal everywhere in the universe and for every frame of reference. An hour was an hour, no matter where you were going or how fast you were going there. The same held true for space. For Newton, space was a kind of stage on which events occurred. Empty and homogeneous, it too was “absolute.” But the Special Theory of Relativity undermined that absolute perspective, arguing that time could only be measured “locally,” that it had no absolute meaning. When Einstein introduced the General Theory of Relativity in 1915, leading the way to our current understanding of gravity as a “warp” in space-time that follows the uneven distribution of mass and energy, there seemed to be nothing remaining in the knowable universe other than “local” or “relative” truth. Taken together, then, Einstein’s theories did indeed play havoc upon the absolute frame of reference that had defined knowledge in the modern world for so long that it had come to seem “intuitive” (though, of course, Newton’s dual notions of absolute time and empty space were anything but intuitive when he built his theories around them). Einstein’s conclusion that two events seen as simultaneous in one frame of reference are not necessarily simultaneous when measured in another both disturbed and exhilarated the minds of modern poets and writers, raised on clocks that told “correct” or “incorrect” time in an industrial world that thrived on standardization.

To suggest that there is no preferred viewing point from which two events can be said to be “really simultaneous,” however, did not mark the end of objective measurement of events, but rather the beginning of a new category of objectivity that took into account several viewpoints at once in the manner of a cubist painting.[4] Einstein’s Relativity can be understood as the scientific embodiment of aesthetic modernism, then, not only because of its revolutionary questioning of universal truth, but also – and perhaps more importantly – because this act of questioning was never meant to deny a more subtly accomplished preservation of the boundaries of objective certainty. Lewis Feuer’s historical study of Einstein’s physics observes that the word “relativity,” which had functioned as a symbol for a “generational rebellion,” in early twentieth-century Europe, was in a sense “a misnomer for the logical content” of a theory aimed at “a higher absolutism, a more general objectivity of natural law, rather than a relativism or subjectivity.”[5] Despite his rejection of an absolute frame of reference, Einstein remained wedded to the idea of an over-arching deterministic universe, unified by certain fundamental laws expressible in mathematical formulae and knowable by human observers. Einstein believed with almost mystical conviction in a reality separate from the observational limitations of humans.

The radicalism of Einstein’s science, then, was based not upon what Tsuji Jun called its “denial of the absolute,” but emerged rather as a revolt against the sensory literalism of nineteenth-century positivism (an epistemological paradigm that remained ill-equipped to deal with subatomic or cosmic reality). It was this displacement of organic notions of “observation” by an expanded model of perception – a model which transcended the limits of the observer’s body – that provided endless inspiration for experimental writers and poets in Taisho Japan. For many Japanese artists, modern science meant not an indictment of the five senses but an emancipation from them: the opening of a vast, unexplored terrain of objective reality.

The link between the reality revealed by modern physics and the reality that a new generation of novelists had begun to describe is too fundamental to be treated using the language of influence. Writers and scientists seem rather to have been jointly discovering, as it were, a new observational grammar. It was a grammar linked not only to atomic models and telescopes, but to the montage techniques of commercial advertising, to technologies of communication, and to the new affordability of portable cameras for private use. The instrumentation as well as the material textures of modern life lent themselves to this new perceptual regime.

In Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s famous 1924 novel Naomi (Chijin no ai), for example, the protagonist and narrator, Jôji, cultivates a sexual relationship with his young lover, Naomi, that revolves closely around the very abstracting processes that links Einstein to cubism.[6] Using a portable camera and private darkroom, Jôji documents Naomi’s physical transformation from an impoverished young café waitress into the seamy facsimile of a Hollywood starlet, eventually assembling a photo-journal that chronicles this metamorphosis by diagramming the changing contours of her body.

I say “diagramming” because the form this photo-diary ultimately takes departs almost wholly from any pretenses of mimetic representation. The album, which Jôji titles “Naomi Grows Up,” assumes an almost non-Euclidean structure, penetrating Naomi’s physicality (“in different lighting and from various angles”) in ways that would have been impossible with the unaided eye: “As I looked through the diary, there were photographs of every kind. The way I had taken them had become gradually more detailed and precise, with enlargements of certain parts: the shape of her nose, of her eye, her lips, her finger, the curve of her arm, her shoulder, the contours of her backbone, the line of her leg, her wrist, her ankle, elbow, kneecap, even the sole of her foot…”[7] Described with great care, Jôji’s photo-montage embraces the power of a new observational relationship, a new category of “objective” knowledge. For Jôji, this knowledge is both erotic and aesthetic. But it is also fundamentally “scientific” in its inflection, evincing a form of precision that refers to its object without imitating it. Indeed, the accuracy of Jôji’s photo collage functions precisely by refusing to reveal its object (Naomi’s body) as a totality. The only totality is the photo-album itself, which becomes a kind of “field of vision” without any fixed viewing point.[8]

If science “describes nature as exposed to our methods of questioning,” as Werner Heisenberg wrote, then Jôji’s method of questioning is prurient, his means photographic.[9] The photographic apparatus and its ancillary processes – development, cropping, assembly – have released Jôji from the sensory limitations of his own body. And this may be the fundamental irony of the novel’s eroticism.

Photography has come to be understood as a technical embodiment of the ontological doubts and perceptual self-reflexivity of nineteenth-century positivism: as a technique “bound up in non-veridical theories of vision,” in Jonathan Crary’s words, “that effectively annihilate the real world.”[10] From the perspective of early twentieth-century scientific realism, however, the well-noted capacity of the photographic image to “circulate and proliferate,”[11] to abstract itself from the fabric of space and time, far from severing its link to the real world, actually enhances its documentary connection to it. In the world of Tanizaki’s novel, Jôji’s photo-album is profoundly and necessarily referential. Despite its unnatural magnifications, manipulations of perspective, and jarring juxtapositions, the narrator’s photo-collage maintains an undiminished existential identity with its object. It is the actual existence of Naomi’s body, after all, that makes the photos erotically meaningful. What has been severed here is not the link between the observer and the referent, but the link between the observer and his own physiology. Jôji’s photo-diary evinces a form of realism, in other words, reminiscent of Maxwell’s electromagnetic models. Both unnatural and precise, referential but also abstract, the photo-images of Chijin no ai seem to occupy the epistemologically ambiguous position of modernism itself.

[1] Tsuji Jun, Tsuji Jun Zenshû, vol. 1, “Bungaku igai” (Tokyo: Gogatsu Shobô, 19?), 327.

[2] Kaneko Tsutomu, “Ainshutain,” in Miyazawa Kenji Handobukku, ed. Amazawa Taijirô (Tokyo: Shinshokan, 1996), 12.

[3] Kaneko Tsutomu, Ainshutain shokku: Nihon no bunka to shisô e no shôgeki, vol. 2 (Tokyo: kawade Shobô Shinsha, 1991), 287-288.

[4] For a discussion of the links between Einstein and cubism, see Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

[5] Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), 59-60.

[6] The title of Tanizaki Junichirô’s novel Chijin no ai actually means “Love of a Fool,” but it has come to be known in English by the title, Naomi, based on Anthony H. Chambers’ excellent translation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990). The version I cite here is collected in Tanizaki Junichriô Zenshû (Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha, 1967), vol. 10. All translations are mine.

[7] Ibid., 255.

[8] I am indebted here to John Berger’s discussion of collage in his essay, “The Moment of Cubism,” in The Sense of Sight (New York: vintage International, 1985), 177.

[9] Cited by Berger in ibid., 176.

[10] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1990) 14. (Italics in original.)

[11] Ibid., 13.